Strange Loop, Ordinary Dilemma

A Strange Loop — which won the best musical Tony, the Pulitzer Prize, and the love of critics and its peers, but couldn’t fill the seats — is closing. Go see it if you can.

There's always this dilemma: whether to please an elite group more sophisticated in their taste, knowledgeable about the medium, and more educated in general or to please the hoi polloi. My mood has taken wild swings both ways my whole career. I don’t know. I think temperamentally, deep down, I’m an elitist. I love the obscure stuff, the weird, in-group, experimental. But sometimes you ‘re not in control of it. You do something strange and the people love it anyway.

Of course pleasing the critics and the audience is ideal. On Broadway, it seems like it's rare work that accomplishes that anymore. Many of the great mid-century musicals and plays were blockbuster popular and also masterpieces, but now it seems like you’re either Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Webber with very little in between. My hunch is that this bifurcation has a lot to do with the fact that theater writers used to “come up in the business” but now they’re plucked by non-profit institutions from MFA programs at elite universities, but it’s possible I have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about. An argument as to whether and how and why is something I’d be more interested in reading than writing.

My painting teacher long ago used to say "your parents will never understand your work," and that maxim has guided me ever since as I negotiate the line between the two.